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0 pointsrwmj12y ago0 comments

This is by choice, because single thread performance matters more, and you can use fork or MPI to scale across NUMA nodes and clusters much more scalably and safely.

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eschulte12y ago

Having used fork/join to parallelize an OCaml genetic algorithm, I can say from experience it is neither safe nor practical.

Edit: Intentionally only supporting single-threaded processes is a perfectly fine design decision, however I haven't seen this argument made for OCaml, rather I've seen "multi-threading our GC would be hard" as the justification for the single-thread limitation. Admittedly it was 3-4 years ago when I last had to deal with this.

avsm12y ago

There are now several experimental multithreaded OCaml runtimes floating around, which also have the key property of not slowing down the single-threaded case. I don't expect multicore to remain a limitation for OCaml in 2014.

chc12y ago

My impression was that the core team was actively opposed to adding parallelism support. Has this changed?

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